LITMIR.BIZ

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is it, Lis?” Mae pulled the ponytail holder out of her hair and wrapped it around her wrist, running her fingers through her sweaty mane.

      “It’s…it’s Josh.”

      Mae switched ears again with the phone, rolling up the window to cut out street noise. “What’s wrong with Josh?”

      “He’s…missing, Mae.”

      Huh? “Wasn’t he going camping or something?” Josh had called earlier in the summer, right after his freshman year at Arizona State, excited because he’d hooked up a summer internship with some medical group. “No, he was going to work for Ambassadors of Health, right?”

      “Yeah, and they sent him to Georgia.”

      Mae had been to Georgia few times. “Maybe he and few friends just took off, went camping somewhere along the Appalachian Trail. He said he was bringing that backpack I got him for graduation—”

      “No! No, Mae, listen. Not Georgia. Georgia. The country.”

      Mae’s gaze focused on a woman and a young boy emerging from the doughnut shop as she tried to process Lissa’s words in her head. In the heat of the closed car, her own odor watered her eyes. “Georgia, as in former-satellite-of-the-Soviet-Union Georgia?”

      “Yes.” Her word caught on a sob.

      “Georgia? North of Iraq, next to Pakistan, Georgia? The one that recently got invaded by Russia?” Mae opened the door and got out, gulping in fresh air. “Why is he in Georgia?”

      “That’s where the aid group sent him. They went over to work in a clinic. Give vaccinations and checkups or something. He was supposed to be there for a month—the rest of his team came home last week—but he wanted to stay. I thought it would be okay, but I just got a call from his leaders, and yesterday he vanished. Maybe he ran off, or maybe…maybe…”

      “Kidnapped.” Mae pushed her sweaty hair away from her face as she turned toward the road. Cars clogged at the stoplight, the rhythmic beat of a radio spilling into the chaos. Pedestrians hurried across the crosswalk, most with cell phones pressed to their ears. A dog barked at her from the cracked window of a banged-up caravan.

      But for Mae, everything had gone still. “Kidnapped,” she whispered again.

      Lissa’s communication had been reduced to muffled crying.

      Mae knew the price of an American teenager in a foreign land—for any American, really, but a kid, now that amounted to a jackpot for any terrorist group looking to cash in. Only this time, they’d picked the wrong kid. A poor kid. A kid without rich parents.

      Her kid.

      “Find him, Mae. I know you…you have friends in the military—what about those friends from Russia? Or your old roommate? Didn’t she marry someone from Russia? Or maybe that American soldier—what was his name—?”

      “David.”

      “Yeah, him.” Hope quickened Lissa’s voice. “He might know something. Or maybe you could ask that boyfriend in Europe?”

      “Chet.” Mae’s throat burned even as she dredged out his name. “Chet runs an international security company.”

      “Yes, Chet! Aren’t you two dating?”

      “We were dating, a long time ago, Lis. Good grief, don’t you listen to anything I say?”

      Silence on the other end, followed by an indrawn, even shaky breath, made Mae cringe. “We broke up a year ago but that doesn’t matter.” She opened her car door and slid back in. “I’ll find him, Lis. I’ll find Joshy.”

      When Lissa spoke again, Mae heard the confidence, the trust that she’d always found so painfully suffocating—and today, terrifying. “I know you will, Mae.”

      Mae hung up. Stared at the phone. Shoot. She hated this part.

      I love you, Mae. But I don’t want you to work for me.

      You mean you don’t want me in your life, she’d said.

      She would never forget his steady, dark-eyed stare, or the rawness in his expression.

      Nor the hurt on his face when she’d dumped her drink over his head and walked away.

      She only gave herself another moment’s debate before breaking all her promises to herself and dialing the man who’d nose-dived her life.

      Her heart.

      Chet Stryker.

      As with every mission Chet Stryker had ever accepted, he did his homework, armed himself with the latest technology, contemplated every strategy and embraced whatever character his assignment demanded.

      “I really hate tulle,” he said, as he exited through the security gates of Hans Brumegaarden’s expansive estate in his Snow White costume. The sun had long ago abandoned the day, and a sprinkling of stars barely outshone the lights of Berlin.

      “It does tend to snag on your ankle holster,” Brody “Wick” Wickham said, hoisting his overnight bag of supplies—ammunition, a Heckler and Koch submachine gun, a couple of Glocks and various high-tech surveillance equipment—over his shoulder, his bad mood etched on his craggy face. “I could use a night at the Hyatt.”

      Chet didn’t blame him. His elite security team had spent five hours in the late summer sun dressed as Grumpy, Sleepy and Sneezy. Lucky him, as the team leader, Chet had landed the role of Snow White.

      He had to be the laughingstock of the international-security community. Apparently, if anyone needed a decorated, former Delta Force operative with ten years of undercover experience and his team of highly trained specialists to impersonate fairy-tale characters, Chet Stryker was their man.

      He’d wanted to run Stryker International on his terms. With his choice of assignments.

      But clearly pride wouldn’t pay the bills. And they had accomplished their mission—to protect six-year-old Gretchen Brumegaarden and one hundred of her closest friends and family members from a terrorist threat. Still, it felt like a compromise. He needed to do everything he could to make his little company a success, hoping to convince himself that he hadn’t blown everything when he’d retired early from the military.

      Since the day he’d kicked Mae out of his life, it seemed he’d made one glaring mistake after another.

      “We’re taking the midnight train back to Prague,” Chet said, pressing the automatic unlock on their economy rental car.

      “No airplane?” Artyom, his computer techie from Russia, ran to catch up, toting his own provisions, most of them contained in his laptop case. He’d been recruited by Wick, a former Green Beret whom Chet had enticed to leave special ops after a particularly brutal tour. Chet’s business partner Vicktor—a former FSB agent—had closed the deal, talking Artyom into joining Stryker International. Luke Dekker, former Navy SEAL, acted as medic and team explosives expert. Now all Chet needed was a profiler, perhaps a negotiator, and, yes, a pilot.

      He still hadn’t found someone as skilled as Mae. Not even close. He’d been setting his sights lower and lower, until he was looking at recruits fresh out of a bush pilot school in Alaska. He needed Mae. But every time he opened his phone to call her, his chest would burn, old wounds stirring to life, and he’d shut his phone and the image of her from his mind.

      He wouldn’t—couldn’t—put someone he loved in the line of fire. Been there, done that.

      Chet opened the trunk and threw in the gear. “No airplane. This check barely covers our expenses and salaries for the next month. An airplane means another dwarf suit in your near future.”

      Chet needed a break, something to put his business on the map. Something big, international and newsworthy.

      Maybe even something to make him feel like a soldier, a patriot, again. Anything but a cartoon character playing a charade.

      The

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